Your Wall Quotes (page 5)
Because you are never herebut always there, I forgetnot you but what you look like. You drift down the streetin the rain, your facedissolving, changing shape, the coloursrunning together. My walls absorbyou, breathe you forthagain, you resumeyourself, I do not recognize you. You rest on the bedwatching me watchingyou, we will never knoweach other any betterthan we do now
Margaret Atwood
Oedipa resolved to pull in at the next motel she saw, however ugly, stillness and four walls having at some point become preferable to this illusion of speed, freedom, wind in your hair, unreeling landscape—it wasn’t. What the road really was, she fancied, was this hypodermic needle, inserted somewhere ahead into the vein of a freeway, a vein nourishing the mainliner L.A., keeping it happy, coherent, protected from pain, or whatever passes, with a city, for pain. But were Oedipa some single...
Thomas Pynchon
Dr. Luce introduced the concept of “periphescence”. The word itself means nothing; Luce made it up to avoid any etymological associations. The state of periphescence, however, is well known. It denotes the first fever of human pair bonding. It causes giddiness, elation, a tickling on the chest wall, the urge to climb a balcony on the rope of the beloved’s hair. Periphescence denotes the inital drugged and happy bedtime where you sniff your lover like a scented poppy for hours running. (It...
Jeffrey Eugenides
Holy men? Holy cabbages! Holy bean-pods! What do they do but live and suck in sustenance and grow fat? If that be holiness, I could show you hogs in this forest who are fit to head the calendar. Think you it was for such a life that this good arm was fixed upon my shoulder, or that head placed upon your neck? There is work in the world, man, and it is not by hiding behind stone walls that we shall do it.
Arthur Conan Doyle
And what are you that, missing you,
I should be kept awake
As many nights as there are days
With weeping for your sake?
And what are you that, missing you,
As many days as crawl
I should be listening to the wind
And looking at the wall?
I know a man that’s a braver man
And twenty men as kind,
And what are you, that you should be
The one man in my mind?
Yet women’s ways are witless ways,
As any sage will tell,—
And what am I, that I should love
So wisely and so well?
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Inspiration,' the false artist says,'it just comes to me.' And it shows. His pictures are as like as the four walls of his room -- morning, evening, midnight, noon. For myself, I have to search for it. The whole world is your palate, but only if you reach, take hold of what you need and pocket it.
Kurt Schwitters
Lay down these words. Before your mind like rocks. placed solid, by hands. In choice of place, set. Before the body of the mind in space and time: Solidity of bark, leaf, or wall riprap of things: Cobble of milky way. straying planets, These poems, people, lost ponies with. Dragging saddles -- and rocky sure-foot trails. The worlds like an endless four-dimensional. Game of Go. ants and pebbles. In the thin loam, each rock...
Gary Snyder
You are free when you gain back yourself,” Madame Wu said. “You can be as free within these walls as you could be in the whole world. And how could you be free if, however far you wander, you still carry inside yourself the constant thought of him? See where you belong in the stream of life. Let it flow through you, cool and strong. Do not dam it with your two hands, lest he break the dam and so escape you. Let him go free, and you will be free.
Pearl S. Buck
Typical!” he said to Sophie. “ I break my neck to get here, and I find you peacefully tidying up!”
Sophie looked up at him. As she had feared, the hard black-and white light coming through the broken wall showed her that Howl had not bothered to shave or tidy his hair. His eyes were still red-rimmed and his black sleeves were torn in several place. There was not much to choose between Howl and the scarecrow. Oh, dear! Sophie thought. He must love Miss Angorian very much. “I came for...
Diana Wynne Jones